Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography.

Wait a minute--the Internet is used for pornography? Why am I just hearing about this now?

Depending on sampling frequency, it's entirely possible that the United Kingdom now has the world's largest collection of totally illegal amateur hebephilic pornography. They'd better hope that whoever wrote up their immunity included a catch-all clause... That's the sort of thing you could easily overlook while crafting your Enabling Act.

Had to go and look up that term, and I'm not sure whether I should thank you or go and bleach my eyeballs. The Guardian article noted that there was:

"Furthermore, all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.

Orly? Exactly who authorized the keeping of such images and why is that necessary or proportionate? Also, the use of this word, "rigorous"? I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Also, this fun little tidbit:

Rather than collecting webcam chats in their entirety, the program saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ's servers.

Well, gosh, that's mighty white of you, GCHQ/NSA/FiveEyes. Gonna guess the it's less the former, much, much more the latter.